by CCW | 23 March 2016 23:00
Only Luke tells us about the scene in Bethany with Jesus and Martha and Mary. It is a powerful New Testament image which becomes an integral part of the interplay between activity and contemplation in the Christian understanding. It looks back to Old Testament stories such as Leah and Rachel, the wives of Jacob, who become symbols of the active and the contemplative life respectively. It looks back to the philosophical reflections of Plato and Aristotle about what constitutes the good life. Contemplation is the highest good. Why? Because in some sense we participate in the absolute goodness of God and honour that as absolute. We don’t try to use God for our ends and purposes or measure God according of our ends and purposes.
The paradox is that such an outlook alone redeems our activities. Why? Because they, too, are gathered into the goodness of God and become the forms of our participation in the life of God. Our activities are given an end with God. One thing is needful and that is about our life with God.
The Passion of Christ shows us our actions in disarray and disorder precisely because what has been ignored or denied is the orientation and direction of our actions to God. “Mary has chosen the good portion”, Jesus says which is not to say that the actions of Martha are simply worthless or bad; the problem lies in the attitude or approach. She is “anxious and troubled about a multitude of things”, he says. Therein lies the problem. She lacks the focus of Mary who has chosen that good portion of “sitting and listening to the words of Jesus”. Only so can our activities begin to be part of his life in us. Through Mary, through the one thing needful, our actions and activities have purpose and meaning. Without Mary, without the one thing needful, everything is thrown into disarray and disorder.
Holy Week would have us contemplate the different forms of that disorder and disarray that belongs to us in our souls and in our communities. We read on the Wednesday[1] and the Thursday[2] of Holy Week from the Passion according to St. Luke. The beginning of his Passion on the Wednesday of Holy Week is illumined by the readings from Numbers[3] and Leviticus[4] and by the sixteenth Chapter[5] of St. John’s Gospel. Wednesday in Holy Week is also marked by the anticipatory service of Tenebrae, meaning shadows or darkness in which we pray the office of the Mattins of Maundy Thursday with the reading from Lamentations[6], where the lonely desolation of Jerusalem, abandoned and betrayed is now associated with Christ. Her words, the words of Jerusalem in disarray, will become the words of the crucified to us on Good Friday.
We enter into the Triduum Sacrum, the three great holy days of Holy Week, into an even more intense contemplation of the Passion. But in keeping with Luke’s insight about activity and contemplation, about outward actions and inward intentions, we find in this contemplation a deeper understanding of ourselves and our actions.
Luke provides a more inward understanding, a more psychological perspective, about the struggles of Christ in the approach to his Passion. His account of the Christ’s celebration of the Passover with his disciples in the Upper Room is intensified by Christ’s remarks about service and covenant and, even more, by the dialogue with Simon Peter. “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you … but I have prayed for thee”. Against Peter’s protestations of loyalty that he is “ready to go with thee both to prison and to death”, Jesus says, “I tell thee, Peter, the cock shall not crow this day, before that thou shalt thrice deny that thou knowest me”. It is Christ’s insight into Peter’s character and into our humanity. We may think and want to do the right thing; it doesn’t mean that we do it.
Luke’s account of Christ’s agony in Gethsemane is at once psychologically charged and dramatically imaged. “And being in an agony, he prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground”. I love that “as it were”, a phrase capturing the meaning of a Greek adverb but revealing the awareness that this is a metaphor, an image, of tears not literally of blood but being like drops of blood yet anticipating the actual blood of Christ’s crucifixion. Here we see the spiritual intensity of the Passion. “Father, if it be possible, remove this cup from me: nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done”. “Be it unto me”, Mary too had said. It was Luke’s word at her Annunciation. It provides a critical connection to the Lord’s Prayer. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, we pray, seeking exactly that connection between heaven and earth, between God and our humanity. Nowhere is the intensity of prayer, true prayer as the soul’s wrestle to discover and be defined by the will of God, more dramatically seen than in Christ’s struggle in Gethsemane. Luke’s insight illumines the deeper dimensions of our own souls.
The beginning of his account of the Passion ends with the repentance of Peter. Peter denies that he knows Jesus three times. With Luke, it is not just that the cock crew the very moment of Peter’s third denial that convicts him of his betrayal. It is Jesus’ “turn[ing] and look[ing] upon Peter”. It is not condemnatory but loving judgement that convicts and moves us. Through that look, “Peter remembered the word of the Lord … And Peter went out and wept bitterly”.
Such is the intensity of the psychological drama of Luke’s Passion. He is, as Dante suggest, scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. Luke takes us into the inner struggle of the human soul of Christ but also reveals the relationship between the Son and the Father. The theology of redemption reveals the Trinity. Luke helps us to see the deeper spiritual and inward meaning of the outward actions of the Passion. He convicts our hearts by showing us the heart of Christ humanly speaking. But he also shows us the heart of God. The loving look of Christ reveals how God sees us, namely, in his infinite love for us. He seeks our good out of our evil.
The one thing needful is to attend to the images of Christ’s struggle for our salvation. That, and that alone, redeems all our doings.
Fr. David Curry
Wednesday in Holy Week
Tenebrae, 2016
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2016/03/23/sermon-for-tenebrae-wednesday-in-holy-week-2/
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